Video Customer Review | PA Housing Financing

Pennsylvania Housing Financing

Transforming a mishmash of custom scripts by simplifying and automating file transfers with GoAnywhere has made a huge difference for Kevin and his team of nine developers. Now they use GoAnywhere exclusively for external file transfers with trading partners, as well as internal transfers among disparate systems.

Transcript:

My
name is Kevin Wike I work for Pennsylvania Housing Financing, a finance agency.
I am the manager of application development. I have 9 developers that work for
us. We write mostly all custom codes at our agency. We're a quasi- state
government agency and we kind of fulfill the same duties as a the bank does,
but we have niche programs that private industry is not interested in, so our
mission is to provide affordable housing for the state of Pennsylvania, to
ensure that happens.

How are you using GoAnywhere?

We
do a lot of data exchange with business partners where I work and when we first
started doing that, we wrote our own custom routines, some were DOS-based some
were written in Windows programs and some was done in the iSeries with custom
code, and we had a mishmash of different ways of accomplishing it and over time
that group got bigger and bigger and it was becoming unmanageable. So we
decided to go with GoAnywhere and that is now our standard for any data
interchange of data leaving the iSeries platform. And we even use it for
internal transfers of data and like between the iSeries and our web server Windows
servers; we push out documents to be consumed inside of the websites. So all
the routines to do that type of data manipulation and movement-we do everything
with GoAnywhere. We decided to use that as our standard and it's great now
because we know where every data exchange project is, it's inside of GoAnywhere
and it's self-documenting. So that has gotten huge. We literally have hundreds of
different jobs that run. We use it for our EDI exchange, with insurance
companies, data with banks, for our own website consumption, moving everything
off the iSeries -- it's seamless. We tie it with another software package of Help/Systems
Robot (Robot enterprise edition) and between
those two packages working together, it's like we turn it on and it runs
itself.

We
don't just use the FTP, the SFTP procedures that are built into it. We use a
lot of the functionality that's in GoAnywhere.

So
the longer we have it, the more we discover what the capabilities are with the
package, and then somebody will come up with a need, and we'll say before we
write any code to do anything like this, let's check and see what GoAnywhere
does, and most of the time, it has the ability to do it, and that's just
getting better and better all the time.

How has the error reporting helped make your processes more efficient?

We
know if something doesn't run correctly, we aware of it immediately. We
have a lot of that built into our messaging capability, so pretty much when
anything inside of GoAnywhere doesn't run, everybody that's on the programming
staff knows about it immediately.

Sometimes
we have stuff that is self-resetting, so if it doesn't run, it changes a parameter
and then that causes it again to be invoked again at a certain timeframe later,
to recover from that.

What impact has GoAnywhere had on your workflows?

A lot of times we embed those transfer routines right into our
custom code. So we may have a batch
routine that builds a file at a certain time of day or some kind of a trigger
comes in and a file shows up in a folder which through Help/Systems Robot
triggers a routine to run on the iSeries, and that CL program runs which may run
a couple RPG programs and in turn at the very end we invoke a GoAnywhere
procedure to transfer the data. So it's all really tied together tightly.

What would you say about the support you get from Linoma Software?

Documentation
is good, support staff is awesome. We've always had great support. We always
get a reaction right away when we call. There's no wait time. You usually get
through right away to somebody, so it's not like an eight-hour call back
procedure, so support is awesome. And usually it's just something we're just not
aware of that the package can do or maybe we're doing something incorrectly and
I've never known of an issue where we didn't get the corrective action from the
tech support, so we're extremely happy with it.

What else do you like about GoAnywhere?

The
nice thing about this is we've probably hit every different kind of scenario
that we do in our business, and we already have an existing example of it
inside GoAnywhere. So many times these guys just copy a routine, change the parameters,
and now this is the transfer routine for this company which is
just a slight bit different from the other one, and they can have those up
sometimes in a matter of an hour. Where before, you'd have to find the program,
what it does, what kind of a transfer, was it DOS based or a Windows program,
etc, etc. It took longer to do it before. This makes it very simple.

And its
easy to go in and look at a project inside of GoAnywhere and break it down
because of the way it's set up. It's so
prompt driven, and it's very easy to figure out what's going on in the program.
And like I said, it's self-documenting. That is what I like about it. You can go in and get an answer quickly when
you have a question about what is this routine doing and it's not difficult to
figure out.

What advice would you have for others looking for a file transfer solution?

I
think it's priced fairly. The product does a lot more than most people are
looking for, when they are getting software like this, for transferring data.
It's capable of doing a lot of different things. Tech support is awesome.